


the stillness of remembering

by darlingargents



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreamscapes, Fluff and Angst, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Shenanigans, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Set between TCW and Rebels, Trick or Treat: Trick, but also:, more like fluff that turns into angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-06 20:06:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16394237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/pseuds/darlingargents
Summary: A few years after the rise of the Empire, Ahsoka starts to have a recurring dream.





	the stillness of remembering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LittleRaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/gifts).



> I tagged this Trick, but it definitely has some fluffy elements, so... bits of both? Title from Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.
> 
>  
> 
> _"In the stillness of remembering of what you had, and what you lost, and what you had, and what you lost..."_

A few years after the rise of the Empire, Ahsoka starts to have a recurring dream.

Her dreams are mostly nightmares, have been since she starting seeing war firsthand, and so she takes notice of this dream immediately. Most Force-users are pretty good at being aware that they’re dreaming, so within what feels like a few moments, she knows she’s dreaming and that it’s something different.

She’s standing in a meadow. She doesn’t recognize it, but she can see a lake far in the distance and mountains all around. The grass is so, so green, and when she kneels down in it, her bare knees find it surprisingly comfortable. The sky above her is a brilliant, vibrant blue, dotted with puffs of clouds. It’s a perfect day in a beautiful place.

It’s been a long, long time since she had a happy dream. She lies down, closes her eyes, feels the sunlight soaking into her skin and warming her to the core. She hasn’t felt this kind of peace in — longer than she can remember.

When she opens her eyes, she realizes she’s not alone. She rolls onto her side and sits up, brushing bits grass off her clothes — she’s wearing a flowing white dress that she would never wear in reality, but that fits this place perfectly. The other person here is on the next hill over, staring across the rolling hills, facing away from her.

She feels a faint trickle of unease at the sight of the person. It’s disconcerting, because this dream is everything wonderful and beautiful, and it’s strange that the sight of someone she can’t immediately identify would bother her. She pushes down the feeling and walks towards the person, her bare feet entirely comfortable on the seemingly rock-free ground.

When she’s down the hill she landed on and nearly up the next, she realizes that the person is Anakin. He’s still looking away, but she can tell. He looks just like he did the last day they met, on Mandalore.

It takes all her strength to keep walking as her grief hits her like a blow to the chest. She stumbles a little, the illusion of perfection cracking. It should be joyful, seeing Anakin, but all she can remember is the way it felt when his consciousness was snuffed out in an instant like a flame doused in water. How she felt when she was left alone.

He turns his head when she reaches the top of the hill. He looks the same. He looks exactly the same. He smiles, reaches for her.

“Snips,” he says, voice soft and so, so familiar, and she reaches for his hand.

Her fingers brush his, and their warmth goes through her like a shot. And she wakes up in the dark.

She hits the light by her bed in a flailed panic and starts to calm as soon as she can see where she is. In her cabin, on her tiny ship, travelling somewhere in hyperspace on her way to deliver information from Mon Mothma to an undisclosed recipient.

Not in a meadow, not touching the person she cared for most who’s been dead for years now.

Even knowing it was just a dream — and not an upsetting dream, either, a good dream, which makes the tears dried on her cheeks even more baffling — it takes her a long time to go back to sleep. When she does, her dreams are normal. Running, chasing, falling. She wakes up with her heart pounding and normalcy restored.

*

It should’ve been the end of it, but she has the dream again. And again. Not every night, but at least a couple times every week. Every time, she wakes up with tears on her face and agony in her chest as she shoves down the grief that is only being intensified by every night.

She reaches him, after the first time. Touches his hand fully, sits down beside him, tells him she misses him. He tells her the same, stares in wonder at her face as if trying to find out where the teenager he used to know has gone. He’s not real, of course, he’s an embodiment of her grief, but it’s still so very painful when he asks through restrained tears how she’s spent the last few years without him.

Thinking about her real life in these dreams is too painful, so she deflects the real questions, talks about the planets she’s seen — the places she’s gone swimming or hiking, the restaurants or diners on tiny, out-of-the-way planets and fueling stations with the best meals she’s ever tasted, the animals she’s met and occasionally pet. She thinks Anakin is almost frustrated the sixth time she recounts a story about a wonderful tooka that she cuddled and protected until she found its owner, but she can’t feel his emotions, since it’s a dream and he’s not real, so it doesn’t really matter.

“I miss you,” he says one time, months after the first. They’re cloud-watching. The clouds bend into improbable shapes here — Ahsoka has already spotted near-perfect outlines of a nerf, a Jedi starfighter, an ignited lightsaber, and an R2 unit.

“I miss you too,” she says, and reaches down to take his hand and squeeze. Every touch still fills her with warmth.

If she focuses, she can hear the thrumming of her ship’s engine, can feel the cold emptiness of space right outside her window. It’s like she’s split in half: part of her is here, in this meadow with Anakin, in a fantasy world where they could’ve had moments like this. The warmth of that bleeds into the cold of the metal that surrounds her, the stress that’s worn into her very bones, her slow-healing injuries from a fight a few days ago. She’ll be waking up soon.

She wants to stay here a little longer.

She closes her eyes, feels the sunlight soaking into her skin, and feels Anakin’s hand brush against her arm. She opens her eyes again and he’s leaning over her, looking down at her with sorrow in his eyes.

“I wish you were with me,” he says.

“I won’t die for a long, long while, Skyguy,” she says. “Not if I have anything to do with it.”

He looks even sadder, and Ahsoka sits up, feeling faintly uneasy. This isn’t what she’s come to expect from these dreams. As far as she could always tell, they’re simple wish-fulfilment fantasy, but this doesn’t seem to be that.

“Not dead,” he insists, holding her hand tighter. “With me. I’ll find you, I’ll bring us together again. I’ll do anything.”

Ahsoka pulls away, struggling to her feet. The ground feels like it’s swaying under her. The sky is darkening, black-red streaks of colour filling in from all sides, blotting out the clouds and sun. Something is very, very wrong.

“You’re dead,” she says, insistently. Her chest feels like it’s being ripped open. This dream has always been somewhere she could forget that she’s alone in this galaxy without him and it hurts that she has to say it out loud. “You’re dead, you died years ago, and I love you but I’m not going to die just so I can join you—”

She stops. Because Anakin doesn’t look resigned, or sad. He looks furious. It’s an expression she remembers well, but she never would’ve thought she would recall it perfectly enough to recreate it in a dream.

Unless this isn’t her dream.

The thought hits her all at once, thunderous and shocking. She’s always known about Force dreams, Force bonds — and this has all the indications, now that she’s looking. Now that she’s thinking about it.

The sky is black, edged in red. The horizon is lit up, reddish-purple, with lightning, crashing down in the distance. She can hear the thunder almost instantly after the flashes of light. The storm is closing in.

And Anakin looks so very, very angry. His clothes, simple Jedi clothes, are melting away, turning into black leather and plasteel, and she can see the shape of a helmet flickering in and out of existence.

Ahsoka has always thought she’s pretty quick on the uptake, but it takes her several moments of sheer horrified disbelief before she realizes what she’s seeing. And then everything clicks together, piece by piece, in a flurry of understanding that only increases her horror and grief.

“You’re not dead,” she manages to say, forcing the words through her suddenly tight throat. “You didn’t die in Order 66.”

The helmet flickers away. Anakin’s expression is utterly blank, his eyes empty and cold. “Anakin Skywalker died.”

“No,” she says. “No, you are him. Darth Vader.”

A lightning strike hits the ground inches from Ahsoka’s feet and she lets out a scream before she can get herself under control. The smoking crater is hot enough to hurt even without touching her.

“I meant what I said,” Vader says. “I want to see you again. I want you by my side.”

“No,” Ahsoka says. “I’ll be by your side again when you cast down the mask and reject the Emperor. Not before.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then I have nothing more to say to you.” And Ahsoka closes her eyes, holds out her arms, and falls backwards. She hits the ground hard, and hears thunder and a scream of fury before her eyes snap open and she sits bolt upright in her bed.

*

Ahsoka spends the few days in a daze. She doesn’t return to the same dream world. She reads up everything she can find on Darth Vader. The pieces fit, although she wouldn’t have put the pieces together that Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker were one and the same if she hadn’t already known. The only people who seem to have guessed are a few people on holonet forums, and most of them are laughed out of the virtual room at the very suggestion that charismatic and heroic General Skywalker is also Darth Vader, weapon of the Empire.

She’s given up hope of ever seeing him again, though. With every night that passes without returning to the dream, she’s further convinced that he’s finished with her.

She can’t help but feel as if the Force is playing a hideous joke on her, though. She’s wished, in her most miserable moments, that Anakin were still alive. She’d thought maybe she’d do nearly anything. And now she knows he’s been alive the whole time, and he’s Darth Vader. She can’t imagine how it could be any worse.

Except… well. She still can’t figure out why he spent all that time — months, in the real world — in the dream with her. She can see, now, that he was trying to find her, or get information, but he hadn’t pushed. Just been there with her.

She doesn’t want to hold out hope, because being let down would be even worse than the pain she’s feeling now, but maybe — maybe, just maybe, a part of him wants to be Anakin again. He’s always been volatile, prone to letting his temper get the best of him. Maybe his explosion of rage was reactive, and maybe there’s a way to get him back.

Ahsoka doesn’t let herself dwell on those fantasies. But if she thinks about them, just a little, right before she goes to sleep… well. No one will know.

*

She’s entirely given up hope that she’ll ever seen Anakin again when she finds herself back in the dream.

The meadow is gone. It’s all blackened, scorched earth and sky the colour of blood. It looks like the land was swept away in a wildfire, leaving nothing but ruin. Ahsoka notices immediately that she’s dressed differently than before — sturdy, comfortable boots that keep her from touching the razed earth, and sturdy clothes that keep out the chill she can feel on her face. And then she notices Anakin, standing with his back to her, shoulders slumped. He’s not far. She walks for maybe thirty seconds and then she’s standing right behind him.

“Why am I back here?” she asks, and he turns around to face her. He looks like himself, in sturdy and dark clothing and his head uncovered. His eyes are red-rimmed, like he’s been crying.

“I don’t know,” he says, and he sounds like he’s been crying, too. “I don’t know. I brought you here because — it doesn’t matter. This place is gone, anyway.”

Ahsoka is silent for a moment. She doesn’t know what to think, what to believe. Darth Vader is a monster, but Anakin Skywalker — Anakin loved her. Anakin was a good person.

And if the man in front of her is anything more than an illusion, then maybe he’s still in there somewhere.

“Do you want to be Darth Vader?” she asks.

He shoves her and she stumbles back. “Do you?” she asks, and she can see his resigned sadness turn into anger in an instant. The sky darkens further, and she can feel herself falling, and she wakes up in her bed, shaking and cold all over.

She wraps her blanket around herself and leaves her tiny cabin, going into the equally tiny kitchen and getting a drink to calm her nerves. She’s shaking, but she feels — she feels almost hopeful.

It’s strange. But Anakin’s reaction — if he did, it would be easy to prove it. If he wanted to stay where he was, if he wanted to continue his reign of terror with all of his being, it would be easy to say so. To kill her in a dream to prove his point.

But he hadn’t.

And maybe it’s ridiculous that it gives her hope. Maybe it’s beyond foolish that she knows what she has to do now.

If Ahsoka fell to the dark, she would want to be killed or saved, and she knows that the Anakin she’d known and loved would have done that. It’s only fair that she’ll do the same to him.

She waits until the shaking stops, and then begins to make a plan. She has a task, and she’ll complete it. No matter what it takes.


End file.
